Introduction

This book suggests both a formal procedure for making progress on the mind-body problem and a substantive solution to it, with special attention to consciousness and freedom. The mind-body problem, which Arthur Schopenhauer called the "world-knot," has arguably been the central problem in modern philosophy since its inception in the seventeenth century. With regard to the twentieth century in particular, John Searle in The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992) has expressed his considered judgment that, "contrary to surface appearances, there really has been only one major topic of discussion in the philosophy of mind for the past fifty years or so, and that is the mind-body problem" (RM, 29).

As indicated by the titles of a number of recent books—for example, Nicholas Humphrey's Consciousness Regained (1983), William Lycan's Consciousness (1987), Paul Churchland's Matter and Consciousness (1988), Alastair Hannay's Human Consciousness (1990), Colin McGinn's The Problem of Consciousness (1991), William Seager's Metaphysics of Consciousness (1991), Daniel Dennett's modestly titled Consciousness Explained (1991), and Owen Flanagan's Consciousness Reconsidered (1992)—consciousness has widely come to be seen as lying at the heart of the mind-body problem. Consciousness, says McGinn, is "the hard nut of the mind-body problem" (PC, 1). Dennett says (somewhat optimistically), "Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery" (CE, 21). Seager, speaking of the difficulty of fitting psychology into the hierarchy of the sciences, says that "the source of the difficulty is consciousness" (MC, 185–86). Humphrey, in A History of the Mind (1992), says, "The mind-body problem is the problem of explaining how states of consciousness arise in human brains" (HM, 2–3). John L. Pollock, in How To Build a Person (1989), has said, "The most perplexing problem for any materialist theory of the person is that of making sense of

consciousness" (HBP, 28). Thomas Nagel, whose work, especially "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" has provoked much of the current ferment, says, "Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable" (MQ, 165). In Mental Reality (1994), Galen Strawson, using "experience" synonymously with "consciousness," says that "the existence of experience is the only hard part of the mind-body problem for materialists" (MR, 93).

The problem of consciousness, as the central feature of the mind-body problem, is also widely seen as a problem for science (not simply for philosophy). Colin Blakemore and Susan Greenfield, editors of Mindwaves: Thoughts on Intelligence, Identity, and Consciousness (1987), say that "the nature of consciousness may come to be seen as the central problem of research on the brain" (MW, vii). A few recent books (besides some of those already mentioned) illustrating this point are Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics (1989), Gerald M. Edelman's Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind (1992), and Israel Rosenfield's The Strange, Familiar, and Forgotten: An Anatomy of Consciousness (1992).

Whereas it is now widely recognized by dualists and materialists alike that human consciousness creates a serious, perhaps intractable, mind-body problem for modern philosophy and science, the fact that human freedom is part of that problem is much less widely recognized, especially among materialists. Nevertheless, I will argue, we all inevitably presuppose that we have not only consciousness but also (a significant degree of) freedom, so that any acceptable solution to the mind-body problem must also be able to account for our freedom. I have pointed to the equal importance of this issue by including "freedom" in this book's subtitle. Indeed, I consider chapter 9, in which freedom is defended, to be the most important chapter of the book. The earlier chapters, although important in their own right, prepare the way for understanding how the kind of freedom that we all presuppose in practice can be affirmed in theory.^[*]

This book is based on the conviction that a development that has occurred in the intense and extensive current discussion provides an opportunity for a breakthrough with regard to the central metaphysical assumption that has led to the intractability of the mind-body problem, an intractability that has taken the form of a standoff between dualists and materialists. Although dualists were in the majority in the early part of the modern period and materialists have been in the ascendancy since the second half of the nineteenth century, each side has always faced insuperable difficulties. During most of this period, given the assumption that materi-

alism (sometimes called physicalism) and dualism were the only serious options, dualists were content to rest the case for their position primarily on the fact that materialism confronted insoluble problems. Materialists in turn rest their case primarily on the insuperable obstacles faced by dualism. Each side, accordingly, largely ignored or at least minimized the problems in its own position. The recent development that has occurred is a much greater willingness by advocates on both sides to admit the deep problems in their own positions.

On the dualist's side, Geoffrey Madell, in Mind and Materialism (1988), has been particularly frank about "the difficulties which any dualist position confronts" (MM, preface [n.p.]). While arguing that materialism's problems are so great that "interactionist dualism looks to be by far the only plausible framework in which the facts of our experience can be fitted" (MM, 135), he admits that "the nature of the causal connection between the mental and the physical, as the Cartesian conceives of it, is utterly mysterious" (MM, 2). He also concedes the "inexplicability" of the appearance of consciousness at some point in the course of evolution and in the development of each embryo, prior to which everything was understandable in terms of physical laws alone (MM, 140f.). He offers, accordingly, only "a limited and qualified defense of dualism" (MM, 9).

Madell's confession of inexplicable mystery was anticipated in 1977 by fellow dualist Karl Popper. In an earlier book, Popper had seemed confident of finding a solution. "What we want," he said, "is to understand how such nonphysical things as purposes, deliberations, plans, decisions, theories, tensions, and values can play a part in bringing about physical changes in the physical world" (OCC, 15). But in the 1977 book he wrote with John Eccles, The Self and Its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism, he admitted that understanding how interaction occurred between nonphysical mind and physical brain was perhaps impossible. "Complete understanding, like complete knowledge," said Popper, "is unlikely to be achieved"(SAB, 105). Popper was not as ready as Madell now is to admit that this constitutes a serious problem for the dualistic hypothesis, but his admission is significant nonetheless.

More remarkable and extensive has been the change in attitude on the part of those who reject dualism in favor of some form of physicalism or materialism.^[*] On this side, Thomas Nagel's writings have been especially influential. While rejecting a distinct mind or soul and hence dualistic in-

teractionism (MQ, 182, 190, 211; VN, 29), Nagel has said that the drive to develop a physicalist account of mind has led to "extremely implausible positions" (VN, 15). Although he is not ready to conclude that physicalism must be false, he does say that "physicalism is a position we cannot understand because we do not at present have any conception of how it might be true" (MQ, 176). Colin McGinn, having been stimulated by Nagel, has created a considerable stir by going even further. While rejecting dualism and affirming physicalism more emphatically than does Nagel,^[*] he argues that our present perplexity is terminal, that we will never be able to resolve the mystery of how consciousness could emerge from the brain (PC, 1–2, 7). William S. Robinson is equally emphatic. Although he thinks that a physicalistic approach can do justice to more mental phenomena than do Nagel and McGinn, he argues in Brains and People (1988) that it cannot handle sensations, such as pains. There is no imaginable story, he says, that leads from talk of neurons in the brain to "our seeing why such a collection of neurons has to be a pain." And this absence of understanding, Robinson adds, "is not merely a temporary limitation" (BP, 29). William Seager, although not ready to declare that physicalism will never solve the mind-body problem, says that the record thus far suggests that this may well turn out to be the case. In spite of holding that physicalism "still deserves our allegiance" (MC, 224), he says that "the degree of difficulty in formulating an explicit version of physicalism which is not subject to immediately powerful objections is striking" (MC, 4). Reviewing the various types of physicalism (type-identity theory, functionalism, token-identity theory, psychological instrumentalism, eliminative materialism), he says, "Taken as a group they appear as an orderly retreat becoming a rout" (MC, 32). The attempt to deal with consciousness in terms of the normal explanatory method of physically resolving higher phenomena into lower elements results, Seaget says, in "a 'principled breakdown' of the explanatory scheme," adding that "it remains true, and may forever remain true, that we have no idea what-soever of how the physical states of a brain can constitute consciousness" (MC, 195). In a similar vein, Galen Strawson says that the "mysteriousness, for us, of the relation between the experiential and the physical-as-dis-cerned-by-physics is . . . a sign of how much is at present, and perhaps forever, beyond us" (MR, 50). Likewise, Jaegwon Kim's 1993 book, Supervenience and Mind, concludes with the reflection that the physicalists' attempt to save the reality of the mental seems "to be up against a dead end" (SM, 367).

For good measure we can throw in a similar conclusion by an advocate of epiphenomenalism, which, being halfway between dualism and materialism, can be considered an aberrant version of one or the other. Keith Campbell, the second edition of whose Body and Mind appeared in 1984, at one time had accepted materialism. But he came to reject it after deciding that phenomenal properties, such as the feeling of pain, could not be properties material objects could have (BM, 105–9). His "new epiphenomenalism" says that we do have a spiritual mind, which is produced by the body, but that it does not act back on the body (which allows a physicalist, deterministic account of human behavior, the need for which is a regulative principle for Campbell [BM, 125]). Recognizing that his position shares an "embarrassing" question with dualism, namely, how a "spiritual mind"—our awareness with its phenomenal properties—can be "caused by changes in sense organs and brain," be says: "How this is done we do not know. . . . I suspect that we will never know how the trick is worked. This part of the Mind-Body problem seems insoluble. This aspect of humanity seems destined to remain forever beyond our understanding" (BM, 131).

This new situation—the recognition by leading advocates on all sides of unresolved and probably unresolvable problems within their own positions—provides an opportunity for a conceptual breakthrough insofar as it has led to the realization that a satisfactory solution will have to move beyond assumptions of long standing. Nagel has again led the way. "The world is a strange place," he says, "and nothing but radical speculation gives us the hope of coming up with any candidates for truth" (VN, 10). Suggesting the direction that this radical speculation should take, he says that "any correct theory of the relation between mind and body would radically transform our overall conception of the world and would require a new understanding of the phenomena now thought of as physical" (VN, 8).

Strawson^[*] agrees. Saying that "the enormity of the mind-body problem" requires a "radical response," he predicts that a solution, if possible at all, will involve a "revolution" in our conception of the nature of the physical (MR, 99, 92). McGinn locates the intractability of the mind-body problem in "our inadequate conception of the nature of the brain and consciousness" (PC, 2n). Although doubting that we are up to the kind of radical reconception that would be needed, he does agree that "something pretty remarkable" would be necessary to find a constructive solution to the mindbrain relation (PC, 2, 86, 104).

John Searle has been particularly caustic in his treatment of the materialist tradition, saying that the "most striking feature of . . . mainstream phi-

losophy of mind of the past fifty years" is how much of it "seems obviously false" (RM, 3). It also, Searle suggests, reflects a neurotic-like pattern of behavior:

A philosopher advances a materialist theory of the mind. . . . He then encounters difficulties. . . . [C]riticisms of the materialist theory usually take a more or less technical form, but in fact, underlying the technical objections is a much deeper objection. . . : The theory in question has left out . . . some essential feature of the mind, such as consciousness or 'qualia' or semantic content. . . . And this leads to ever more frenzied efforts to stick with the materialist thesis and try to defeat the arguments put forward by those who insist on preserving the facts. After some years of desperate maneuvers to account for the difficulties, some new development is put forward that allegedly solves the difficulties, but then we find that it encounters . . . the same old difficulties. (RM, 30)

"After half a century of this recurring pattern in debates about materialism," Searle adds, "one might suppose that the materialists and the dualists would think there is something wrong with the terms of the debate. But so far this induction seems not to have occurred to either side" (RM, 49). Searle believes that the basic problem is that materialism has accepted the vocabulary and categories of Cartesian dualism, according to which if something is "physical" it cannot also be "mental," and if something is "mental" it cannot also be "physical" (RM, 14, 26, 54). A constructive solution will require a reconception in which this "conceptual dualism" (RM, 26) is rejected.

Although I do not believe, for reasons I will give later, that Searle's own way of rethinking the relation between physicality and mentality provides the basis for a satisfactory solution, I do believe that his formal recommendations about the kind of radical reconceptualizing that we need, along with those of Nagel, McGinn, and Strawson, point in the right direction. This growing awareness by both dualists and materialists of the inadequacy of their own positions, I have suggested, creates an opportunity for real progress on the mind-body problem, because it reveals the need for more radical reconceptualization. The perception of this need should lead, in turn, to a greater openness to alternative approaches. One philosopher who has especially realized this implication is Strawson. Taking alternative views such as idealism and panpsychism seriously, says Strawson, is part of "a proper response" to the fact that, given standard assumptions about the physical and the mental, the mind-body problem has proved to be intractable (MR, 75, 108). My book is an attempt to get a hearing for a particular version of one of these alternative approaches.

As my comments thus far should make clear, I think that the basic problem has been conceptual, which means that the solution must be a philo-

sophical one. This does not mean that I belittle the role science has to play. On the contrary. One of my central purposes is to remove from the back of scientists a false problem with which they have been saddled by bad philosophy, so that they will be free to work without distraction on the properly scientific dimensions of the problem of consciousness. That is, most scientists working in this area have been trying, among other things, to answer a question that is impossible in principle to answer. No amount of empirical research, no matter how brilliant, can answer such a question.

Little progress has been made on the "problem of consciousness," beyond the not unimportant progress of heightening the dissatisfaction with both dualism and materialism, I suggest, for a number of interrelated reasons.

1. Insufficient clarity has been attained on exactly what problem is being addressed.

2. Insufficient attention has been given to the role that both paradigmatic and wishful-and-fearful thinking play in determining our intuitions about regulative principles and data and thereby our theories.

3. The kind of common sense that can be overridden by scientific theory has seldom been distinguished from the kind that cannot.

4. Insufficient clarity has been attained about the regulative principles, both formal and substantive, that should be exemplified if a theory is to be considered a serious candidate for acceptance.

5. There has been insufficient clarity about the data to which an adequate theory should do justice.

6. It is seldom realized that the mind-body problem is rooted even more deeply in the "Cartesian intuition" about the body than in that about the mind.

7. In spite of widespread agreement, especially by nondualists, that "mind should be naturalized," the two fundamental features of mind, experience and self-determination, have generally not been taken to be fully natural. This has led to the false conclusion that dualism and materialism provide the only realistic options (with "realism" understood as the view that the physical universe really exists, independently of human perception and thought). This false conclusion has meant that the third form of realism, panexperientialism, has been virtually ignored.

These seven problems, I suggest, are the various snarls that together have constituted the world-knot. Unsnarling this knot will require overcoming each of these problems. The first seven chapters of this book deal with these seven problems in turn. Chapters 8 and 9 then provide a solution (begun in chapter 7) to the mind-body problem, focusing on consciousness and on freedom, respectively. Chapter 10 then makes the nature and adequacy of

this panexperientialist position clearer by means of a critique of materialist physicalism as articulated in Jaegwon Kim's Supervenience and Mind . Interestingly, it turned out that the order of the chapters, although determined in the light of the logical order in which the various issues had to be discussed, also reflected the difficulty of the various issues. Chapters 1 through 9, accordingly, became progressively longer.